Investing Research Articles

A subscriber requested a test of Ray Dalio‘s All Weather (AW) portfolio with different rebalancing frequencies, allocated to exchange-traded funds (ETF) as asset class proxies as follows: 30% – Vanguard Total Stock Market (VTI) 40% – iShares 20+ Year Treasury (TLT) 15% – iShares 7-10 Year Treasury (IEF) 7.5% – SPDR Gold Shares (GLD) 7.5% –… Keep Reading

How have value, quality, low-volatility and momentum equity factors, and combinations of these factors, performed in recent years. In their October 2020 paper entitled “Equity Factor Investing: Historical Perspective of Recent Performance”, Benoit Bellone, Thomas Heckel, François Soupé and Raul Leote de Carvalho review and put into context recent performances of these these factors/combinations as… Keep Reading

The full-year Trading Calendar indicates that the U.S. stock market has three phases over the calendar year, corresponding to calendar year trading days 1-84 (January-April), 85-210 (May-October) and 211-252 (November-December). What are typical stock market returns and return variabilities for these phases? Using daily S&P 500 Index closes from the end of December 1927 through… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 1/19/21 through 1/22/21. These summaries give you a quick snapshot of our content the past week so that you can quickly decide what’s relevant to your investing needs. Subscribers: To receive these weekly digests via email, click here to sign up for our mailing list.

Can Bitcoin, or any other crypto-asset, become a durable currency, or is its value a pure bubble? In his October 2020 paper entitled “Fiat Money, Cryptocurrencies, and the Pure Theory of Money Edward Elgar Handbook on Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies”, David Glasner applies basic concepts and doctrines of the economic theory of money to address the… Keep Reading

Can machine learning software discover predictive stock price patterns? In their December 2020 paper entitled “(Re-)Imag(in)ing Price Trends”, Jingwen Jiang, Bryan Kelly and Dacheng Xiu apply convolutional neural network machine learning software to analyze stock price series images (depicting daily open, high, low, close and moving average prices and trading volume) in search of the… Keep Reading

Intangible assets derive largely from investments in employees, brand and knowledge that are expensed rather than booked. Despite large and growing importance of intangible assets, traditional measures of firm value ignore them. Are firm value assessments therefore defective? In their October 2020 paper entitled “Intangible Value”, Andrea Eisfeldt, Edward Kim and Dimitris Papanikolaou evaluate a… Keep Reading

“Evolution of Bitcoin as an Investment” suggests a shift toward acceptance of Bitcoin (BTC) as an investment asset, as do recent actions by some large investors. Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) offers a way for investors to access BTC via a fund that manages BTC holdings. GBTC price generally carries a premium over its BTC holdings… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 1/11/21 through 1/15/21. These summaries give you a quick snapshot of our content the past week so that you can quickly decide what’s relevant to your investing needs. Subscribers: To receive these weekly digests via email, click here to sign up for our mailing list.

Trading Calendar presents full-year and monthly cumulative performance profiles for the overall U.S. stock market (proxied by the S&P 500 Index) based on average daily behavior. Do monthly behaviors of U.S. stock market sectors deviate from the overall market profile? To investigate, we consider the nine Select Sector Standard & Poor’s Depository Receipts (SPDR) exchange-traded… Keep Reading